Jul. 30th, 2012

While the most consistent left-liberal voices for civil liberties, among them the ACLU, have defended Chick-fil-A’s right to open a business regardless of the proprietor’s political views, there has been far too much silence or even enthusiasm toward these threats of political coercion, which carry potentially totalitarian implications. A government that can prohibit people from engaging in peaceful commerce based on traditional cultural and conservative political values is as big a threat to civil liberties as anything the left imagines a conservative Big Brother poses. Most strikingly, left-liberals often, with a lot of justification, decry the Red Scares in American history—the private and public ostracism and at times oppression that befell communists, communist sympathizers, or anyone deemed too far radically left in America. Communism posed a real threat to world peace and liberty, and its political leaders collectively murdered close to a hundred million people in the 20th century. If Americans should have a right to pursue work despite their sympathies for such a violent ideology, surely Chick-fil-A shouldn’t be blacklisted simply for holding traditional views on marriage.

Jul. 2nd, 2012

Each of the four corners of the bed is comprised of a tall metal tree sculpture which curves delicately upwards and blossoms out above the mattress. Each of the beautiful leaves and tendrils is uniquely hand-forged. The cost of this monumental effort and extreme creativity? A mere $15,000 price tag for the lucky couple who decide to purchase it.

Shawn Lovell specialises in making one-of-kind and commissioned work which can be used in the commercial and residential sector. Her work involves the use of both traditional and modern forging techniques.

Jun. 27th, 2012

You mean the “bath salt” moral panic was baseless scaremongering by the police and media? Shocking!

Rudy Eugene, the man who chewed off a homeless man’s face on the MacArthur Causeway and was shot to death by Miami police, had no drugs in his system other than marijuana, the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office said Wednesday.

“In this new study, they administered a single dose of ketamine and a single dose of placebo to a group of patients on two different days, two weeks apart. The patients were then carefully monitored and repeatedly completed ratings to ‘score’ their depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts.

When the patients received ketamine, their depression symptoms significantly improved within 40 minutes, and remained improved over 3 days. Overall, 79% of the patients improved with ketamine, but 0% reported improvement when they received placebo.

Importantly, and for the first time in a group of patients with bipolar depression, they also found that ketamine significantly reduced suicidal thoughts. These antisuicidal effects also occurred within one hour. Considering that bipolar disorder is one of the most lethal of all psychiatric disorders, these study findings could have a major impact on public health.”

“Risk-based screening, if it describes any partitioning of airline passengers at checkpoints, is a fraud. It doesn’t matter what the criteria are for putting passengers into low-risk and high-risk categories, because the concept is mathematically unsound.

The base rate fallacy is the failure to account for underlying incidence of the condition being tested for. Imagine this hypothetical (and completely fantastical) scenario: that the TSA employs a near-perfect test for risk-based screening, a test that always flags terrorists if they are present and only flags innocent people 1 time out of 10,000. (The TSA’s actual success rate at flagging known terrorists is zero.)

Under these conditions, only one out of every five million people flagged would be a terrorist. This is the base rate fallacy in operation. In other words, for all intents and purposes, every flagged person is a false positive.”